A wiki is a collaboration tool that is gaining popularity for the online sharing and editing of a wide variety of topics. Wikis have the concept of proto links where the author of a wiki page, while authoring content, creates the proto link (or placeholder) to a non-existent page, which proto link can be denoted by a special dotted underline. The proto link serves as a reminder that a page on a particular topic is empty and invites collaboration from other users of the wiki who may be able to contribute to this topic. When a user selects the proto link, a page is automatically created that is the target page for the proto link. The user is navigated to the target page where content can be authored.
Although this feature behavior may be common, it is noted that most wikis are designed to be online and do not have off-lining capabilities. This means that a proto link target resolution will always result in a single page being created. The ability to provide the same wiki proto link behavior both online and offline, however, is problematic. This can result in multiple offline clients resolving the same proto link offline, thus, creating multiple proto page targets for the same link. When the offline clients come back online and synchronization occurs, a page conflict will result where there are multiple proto pages for the same link resulting in incorrect and incomplete content and also conflict in resolving the target page for the link.